India and the War on Iraq:

A Few Thoughts on the Demise of the Civilisational Ethos

Vinay Lal

One brutal and inescapable truth must have become transparent to every

conscientious inhabitant of the globe with the “conclusion”, a conclusion evidently

pronounced prematurely, of the American military engagement in Iraq. The United

States now exercises overlordship over the rest of the world in nearly all domains of life,

and it is determined to exercise its power, if necessary in the teeth of worldwide

opposition, not merely to safeguard its own interests, which for any nation-state must be a

reasonable aspiration, but to ensure that its overwhelming superiority as a military and

economic power remains wholly undiminished and that American notions about what

constitutes “success”, in personal and political life alike, continue to receive the

approbation of the entire world. No country in history has ever sought as complete a

domination over the minds of men and women as that which the United States seeks to

achieve, and that too in the name of freedom, liberty, happiness, and all the other virtues

with which Americans believe themselves to be uniquely blessed. Many well-meaning

Americans opposed to the war appear to think that the cabal of hawks who wield power

in Washington have betrayed the ideals of the American republic, and some appear to

find comfort in the thought that these despots of the lunatic right, many energized by the

moralizing fervor of evangelical Christianity, cannot hold power in perpetuity. But little

do they realize that one American president after another has always insisted that God

takes a special interest in the destiny of the United States, and is intolerant of all

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competing visions of the good and just life. It was the particular shortcoming of

totalitarian, despotic, and colonial regimes that, though their conception of human

fulfillment was dismal and the machinery of state oppression was spectacularly vigilant,

they were unable to prevent their victims from dreaming their dreams. The Americans,

more patient and enthusiastic students of psychology, addressed this problem head-on.

The “American Dream” has never been only about owning one’s own house and car, or

having the freedom to amass guiltlessly a massive fortune or move from one place to

another with abandon: it is a dream that obviates any desire or need to dream any more.

Long before the present war commenced, opponents and political commentators

were asking, ‘Who next after Iraq?’ The direct hostilities had barely ceased before

ominous warnings began to be sounded against Syria, a state which the US has long since

been inclined to view as friendly to Islamic terrorists. The obvious question, from the

standpoint of Indians and even Indians in the diaspora, is what consequences the war

might have on South Asia, and on the relations between India and Pakistan. During the

months that the US was furnishing the groundwork for the conflict and the United

Nations was debating the case for a UN-sanctioned war against Iraq, Pakistan, as a non-

permanent member of the Security Council, never lost any of the ample opportunities it

had of gaining the ear of the world in reiterating its opposition to what it describes as

India’s brutal occupation of Kashmir. Whatever may happen anywhere else in the world,

in Pakistan the default position requires unquestioning fealty to the idea that Muslim-

dominated Kashmir can never be a part of India. Pakistan’s singular foreign policy

mission is to keep alive the issue of Kashmir before the world and appear as a champion

of Kashmiri self-determination, a laudable objective notwithstanding the fact that

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minorities have fared much worse in Pakistan than they have in many other countries. At

the critical moment when Pakistan was being pressurized into supporting the United

States, while common Pakistanis were staging vocal demonstrations in opposition to an

illegal war upon another Islamic nation, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations was

attempting to deflect attention away from Pakistan’s position on Iraq to the conflict in

Kashmir. There might have been more than mere unease at the thought that Pakistan, for

all the goodwill it has earned as a front-line ally of the US in the war against terrorism,

may before long be an object of American wrath. Certainly in India and its diaspora,

supporters of militant Hinduism, who unequivocally declared their enthusiasm for the

war on Iraq, were jubilant at the example set by the United States in its willingness to

subdue a Muslim nation, and forthright announced that if the US wished to be consistent

in its application of foreign policy, Pakistan, as the “hotbed” of international terrorism,

deserved to be subjected to the same punishment meted out to Iraq. Thus, to take one

example, Parsuram Maharaj, one of the leaders of Trinidad’s Sanatan Dharma

Mahasabha, concluded his piece on “The Right of Defeating Iraq” with the plea that “the

American and UK forces upon completion of the Iraq occupation must seriously consider

moving also against the terrorist states of Iran, Syria, Pakistan and North Korea.” Indeed,

taking encouragement from American unilateralism, senior officials in the Indian

government noted that they were similarly entitled to take punitive and unilateral action

against a two-bit terrorist state such as Pakistan.

For most commentators, naked political considerations rise to the fore in assessing

the repercussions that the war on Iraq might have on the Indian subcontinent. The new

U.S.-India Institute for Strategic Policy set up in Washington in the wake of the war

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furnishes some clues that the US and India, whatever their differences, are likely to find

common cause in their desire to curb the growing economic and military power of

China.1 Before Indians exult in the importance that the United States appears to be

attaching to enhanced relations with India, it behooves them to recall that in politics there

are no enduring friends or foes, and whatever the pretensions of the US that it is a force

for “good” in this world, it has shown itself eminently capable of using other nations in

the advancement of its own interests. One Pakistani general, recalling the manner in

which Pakistan was abandoned by the US once the Soviet Union was compelled to

withdraw from Afghanistan, stated that the US had treated Pakistan as a used condom

that is flushed down the drain. But it is for far more than mere political considerations

that Indians should be wary of the triumph of American arms. It is not enough to shudder

at the thought that, acting from sheer arrogance and hubris, in defiance of world opinion,

the United States can take it upon itself to demolish another nation in an act of naked and

barbaric aggression, and even promise other supposed “rogue states” and would-be

recalcitrant nations that the same misfortune awaits them. What is truly alarming is that

in this act of aggression one can witness the flowering of the genocidal intent that has

animated the United States since its very inception as a nation-state that drove native

American tribes into extinction and was founded on slave labor.

Though many supporters of the war, in and outside the American administration,

have been keen on characterizing protestors as naive and unwilling to face up to the

demonic nature of Saddam Hussein’s regime, no one opposing the war did so on the

grounds that Saddam Hussein represented the aspirations of the Iraqi people. That

Saddam was a cruel despot and an absolutely despicable person is not in doubt.

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Americans themselves insisted that Iraq is far more than Saddam Hussein, but the

expression of this sentiment by Americans would be comical if it were not so menacing.

Having homogenized their own culture to an unprecedented degree, the Americans

discovered multiculturalism a couple of decades ago, and ever since have been peddling

this jejune idea to the rest of the world. The “liberation” of Iraq has been justified with

the argument that Saddam Hussein suppressed his own subjects, most particularly Kurds

and Shias, but behind this noise it is not difficult to detect the idea, which commentators

such as Max Boot and Bernard Lewis have not been loathe to express, that Iraq has come

to represent the cruel weight of Arab tradition. Multicultural America has, ironically,

arrogated to itself the mission to pluralize older cultures and make them aware of their

“diversity”, a thought as preposterous as it is sickening. Few among the thousands of

articles published on Iraq in American newspapers and journals have mentioned, for

example, the fact that for well over 2,500 years the Jews were comfortably settled in Iraq,

constituting the oldest diaspora in Jewish history, and that full-scale persecution of Jews

largely commenced in the late 1930s and 1940s after Germany had shown the way.

Throughout the nineteenth century, as Jews were hounded in Europe, and cast aside as

Christ-killers in the United States, they flourished amidst a tolerant society in Iraq.

Considering that Americans, whose worldwide reputation for parochialism is a

fact of life, have generally learnt both their geography and history at war, an activity in

which they are habitually engaged, one can be certain that the vast bulk of the young

soldiers who crossed the bridges over the Tigris and the Euphrates were singularly

unaware that human civilization arose at the banks of these great rivers. Fewer must be

the American soldiers who know of Baghdad as the city that animated the imagination of

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every child and adult familiar with the Thousand and One Nights. Baghdad was for

centuries a city of immense learning, and the Mongols who sacked the city earned

notoriety as ferocious barbarians. Should we think of the Americans, who openly

allowed the National Museum, the National Library, the National Archives, and the

Islamic Library of Qurans at the Ministry of Religious Endowments, to be plundered,

ransacked, and burn, as otherwise? The building housing the Petroleum Ministry was

immediately secured, but it has been stated that troops could not be spared to safeguard

the cultural inheritance, not merely of the Arabs, but of human civilization. No

conspiracy theory is required to entertain the speculation that American collectors who

find the restrictions on export of antiquities in place in countries such as Iraq, Iran, and

India prohibitive and violative of the principles of “free trade” must be secretly rejoicing

that the invisible hand guiding markets has once again asserted its presence. Or is there in

these acts of desecration the sign of something much more ominous, such as the

American penchant for beginning with a clean slate? Closure and erasure are the twin

towers of American hegemony.

As Indians (and others) ponder over the significance of the war on Iraq, they must

commence with the sobering thought that complex and ancient civilizations have no

safeguards and just as little purchasing power in the modern world. Indians might

justifiably trumpet the antiquity of their civilization, the greatness of its achievements in

philosophy, grammar, literature, mathematics, and other domains of cultural and

intellectual life, but the antiquity, complexity, plurality, and ecumenism of Indian

civilization furnish, as the present war has demonstrated, no assurance of survival against

the crusading ambitions of a nation-state whose goodness is more productive of disease,

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devastation, destruction, and death than the wickedness of despots. The ideologues of

Hindutva who rejoice in the humbling of Islam will, one hopes, move to an awareness

that in the humbling of Iraq is the humbling of the very idea of human civilization. As

Americans go about looking for weapons of mass destruction, a quest that has become

increasingly futile, the world should be wary of how Americans have themselves become,

in many more ways than are routinely imagined, weapons of mass destruction.

1 See Conn Hallinan, “U.S. and India -- A Dangerous Alliance” (Washington: Foreign Policy in Focus, 6 May 2003), online at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0305india.html